


Veni, Sancte Spiritus

by Fluxit_Aqua_et_Sanguine



Category: Le Fantôme de l'Opéra | Phantom of the Opera & Related Fandoms, Le Fantôme de l'Opéra | Phantom of the Opera - Gaston Leroux
Genre: Angst, Childhood, Drama, F/M, Have to re-read, May edit and post again someday, Near-Abandonment, Psychological Trauma, Romance, Tragedy, Will likely re-read and discover it's pretty bad, old
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-12-31
Updated: 2015-03-28
Packaged: 2018-03-04 12:05:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 6,576
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3067187
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fluxit_Aqua_et_Sanguine/pseuds/Fluxit_Aqua_et_Sanguine
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Re-posting from another site! </p><p>An attempt at telling Erik's story, starting from his childhood. Reading multiple versions that attempted to explain his origins left me feeling that different but (hopefully) equally-interesting circumstances could have come together to produce the strange and beautiful character that Erik is in Leroux's novel.</p><p>Tags mostly refer to the future trajectory of this work, as I imagine you're aware, what with this starting at Erik's childhood.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Ortus

**Author's Note:**

> Own nothin' relating to Leroux's work, obviously.
> 
> This is my first posting on the Archive-- a little thing that I started writing a long time ago, and kind of like, and would like to continue, if anyone should like this piece. Will post more, if what I post is liked a bit. (I couldn't guess, since I'm not the most-accomplished of authors, and I imagine that there are Greats here in this community... but I can hope.)

Long ago as it was, I _do_ remember when I was a good Catholic boy.

It was a very long time ago, but, yes, there was a period in which I believed in the majestic God and the pomp of the Church. It was a beautiful, if deluded, period in my existence, one which sometimes holds a strange appeal, though I cannot imagine where I would have been, had I followed the path that was set out for me in my own home.

My parents didn’t care to see me since the beginning: I feel, now, that my mother cared more about keeping my face in its black mask then keeping me in warm clothes, and my father was never so unfortunate as to have to see me without it. But they wanted something for me. I suppose, now, that they thought I might be better if I turned into a being with a demon face, but the song of God on his lips. I was that boy for some time, after all. I received the only words of praise I had from my parents when I read the psalms in Latin and prayed for my soul.

We never went to church—my parents must have, once, for people called on them who could only have been insipidly well-meaning church-goers—but I saw a priest sometimes, when my parents left the house, and he had me sing. I was always entranced by the music above anything else to do with the church: Above the angels, or God, or the promise of Heaven. It was the thing that affirmed to me that there _was_ something to place my faith when I doubted. What was this mystical, profound source of joy that none around me seemed to possess? My mother hummed sometimes; my father whistled. But these were not that exultant presence, the potent essence of beauty. It struck me even then, when I was very young. It was, in the same moment, magical and earthly, unlike much of the rest I was taught.

Church was what drove me from my parents’ home, though my awe of music has remained.

I recall it well; one recalls these incidents in life which are novel, though I will admit to having never lived so comfortably that I tend to forget my days. Each is horribly novel. At any rate, I was sitting in my bedroom, contemplating the sounds. (That is always where I have fled and focused when there was nothing else in the world; thus, sounds remain obedient to my will to this day.) There was a mournful _lachrymosa_ weeping on a lonely organ somewhere near to our home; a cat mewed pathetically at our back door, longing for the days when my mother was a young and happy wife who always set out a dish of cream. But, then, there were the voices of my parents. Both middle-register, plain and deliberate, the voices of ordinary people of the middle class, the decent class. They discussed me. I could tell, for they were loath to speak my name, but they talked carefully around a horror that had come into their midst.

“I believe that any goodness—any at all—can he had in the church,” my father said, the sound of pipe smoke and his stuffed armchair weighing down his voice. “People will only have it that way. If the devil’s in any other profession, it will be called ‘the Devil’s work’. Only God can be of any help to him.”

The child’s sense of hard justice and injustice stirred me at that. I knew and loved God, in my way, but never so that I would have dreamed of taking to religion, and nothing more. 

I had my own dreams, visions of a future touched with beauty in every corner, with art and construction and music. Why was it, then, that I was this ‘devil’ at any moment but when I spoke a Christian word?

I now realize that I had run the tolerance of my parents dry. Since that age, I have seen that love flees from one such as myself, one who is both strong-minded and hideous. It does well to spend the tolerance one is meted out, then, in small, frugal change; it doesn’t last long, even then.

As such, the love of my parents—love of those who birthed me, who I know intentionally gave me life—their tolerance had fallen away in a scant eight years. My parents did not love me; my training in religion leads me to that conclusion. Paul’s letter to the Church of Corinth, I recall, states in its didactic verses, “love is patient; love is kind.” What patience or kindness was there in placing me in a perfectly safe, perfectly loathsome environment, devoid of any novelty? Paul goes on to say that “love does not insist upon its own way”; you see, then, how I’ve come to my conclusion about their forced care.

These are things I’ve seen _now._ Then, I was preoccupied with my future. I couldn’t imagine it to be right. Even as a child, I wondered: Who was I, if I could only be accepted in the Church? I did not live in the church; I never intended to go to a cloister and pray at all hours. The Church is such a small, concentrated world, where one can think only on God, with the occasional glimpses into artistry born of adoration. But I thought of so much more than that, and my parents did not see it at all. What would they do with me when I was brought into the church? Would I never see them again? It seemed likely, as they never had me out of the house before. Would I be made an act, something for the churchgoers to stand and admire, for the extreme sin of ugliness turned to a work of God? What—

There was a knock at my door, then, and my racing thoughts slammed painfully against the front of my skull, stopping and bewildering them into a frenzied bemusement. My parents meant to make a proposal to me—I could feel it, the sickening idea heavy on the air.

No coward, I fancied myself, I opened the door to my father. He started a bit; I suspect, because it was dark in my bed-chamber, and my eyes were shining that gold they do in half-light and darkness. My father never got used to me, or any aspect of my ugliness. (I think I was a personal affront to his power of life-giving. What man wishes to discover he has tainted seed?) He recovered himself shortly, however, with a smile as false as his front teeth.

“Erik, dear,” he began. I still can’t quite figure why he tried endearments with me. Though I had once believed that my parents loved me, I never really thought my father held me “dear”, as such. More that he wanted my presence because he had a hand in its creation, like a nonsensical piece of artwork from one’s youth. If I was not cared for so much as that… well, he did have his respectability to maintain. “Your mother and I wanted to talk with you.”

He didn’t take my hand, but directed me to the living-room by a hand in my mother’s direction, where she sat on her old-fashioned settee. I think her a fairly pretty woman to this day, with warm, reddish hair and grey eyes that took on a paler shade of whatever dress she wore. She was in blue, that day—I recall, for it was too serene a shade for the sharp twitching of her eyes from my father’s face to my mask. Her voice, calm as she tried to be, managed to pinch the air about us into a higher level of tension.

“Good-evening, Erik.” I seemed to have become a less-than-welcome guest. “Have you been practising your verses?” I was never an honest child—I am still none—so I nodded. “I’m glad to hear it. You do… love church, don’t you, Erik? The prayer, and the music?” Another nod. I couldn’t explain myself, then, when young, and struck into a sudden barrage of questioning that seemed so inevitable, so unreal. “You would like to sing forever, wouldn’t you? You’d like to be a chorister of God?” I agreed silently once more, but, by now, my mother had suddenly ceased her rapid questioning. “Your father and I have been talking. We’ve decided that you’re ready to become one; wouldn’t that be wonderful, Erik?”

Something in me, a large part of me, when a child, agreed that, yes, it would be wonderful to sing the praises of God for the rest of my days; to be constantly surrounded by that awesome power of artistry. The child’s mind can only hold so many things at once, and, as my mother coerced me, I had quite forgotten all my bitterness, only to be enticed by the promise of beauty. 

I wonder if my parents thought I was facing a test, a choice of temptation or goodness, as Jesus is said to have done during his forty days. It seems that they were, to me: They stood—sat, rather—before me, and looked into my masked face with two pairs of bright, young eyes, one amber-brown and the other a gentle near-blue. They sat, staring at me, willing me to follow the path they wanted, to push me forth into a life that would bring us all into safety, if not happiness.

“What would I do in the church?” I’d never been there before. My home was all I knew at that moment, and, though that place wasn’t exactly a comfort in itself, the church was something totally new and, thus, frightening. “I’ve never been.”

“If anyone outside this house would love you, Erik, they would there,” my father prompted, a smile forcing its way through his wiry moustache. “People would not like you outside it. But there, everyone loves one another, no matter how different. And there’s always music.”

His last words did tempt me; I stood in clear opposition to my parents: They saw goodness only on the religious path, and temptation in refusal. I think these days that it was the temptation of the glorious beauty I was offered that needed to be escaped, the temptation that would bring me into oppression if I allowed it to sway me. I was obliged to move beyond that exultant thing to stand for myself, to cry out with my own music, that which could sing of things outside the Glory of God. I needed to move past them, past it all.  
As I say, I see it now. At the time, I only didn’t want to be confined with new, unknown people.

“Will I stay there?” My voice as a child comes back to me when I recall that time. It was a nervous, flighty sort of soprano that seemed somehow incongruous with my dark hair—certainly with the mask. (But, then, I remain a tenor to this day; it isn’t truly a surprise. It is just that one invariably pictures the boy soprano with an androgynous cherubim face and hair like summer sunshine.)

“You would sing there, Erik. You would get to live with all of the wonderful tunes you love so well. It wouldn’t have to go home with Reverend Robert, as it does here. It would be everywhere, always.” My mother softly whispered that. She had a certain way of speaking lowly to me sometimes; if she were quiet enough, could touch the edge of a loving tone. We were silent for a long while, then, I thinking about the path, and my mother seemingly lost in one of her quiet periods, a contemplative silence that made me think she had shut her mind off from the outside. My father grew impatient after some moments, however, and spoke,

“Reverend Robert shall be here shortly to take you to the Cathedral, Erik. You must tell us—ah, he’s here,” he said in his crispest voice, and hastened to allow Monsieur Robert into our house. He was a humble man, much like my parents, of middling stature and thinning brown hair. He had a warm smile, and a becoming baritone; I wonder if he, too, was brought into the Church by the coercion of music.

“Good-evening, Erik.” He greeted me with more brightness than my parents did, before, but didn’t seem to on that particular meeting. Something tells me it had to do with the idea of attaching responsibility to a thing like me, rather than simply being obliged to visit it every week. “Come now, we must be getting to the Cathedral. There are many people waiting to meet you.” Reverend Robert moved to take my hand, then; I shied away, and I could feel him level his brown gaze on me.

“I don’t want to meet people. I’d like to stay here, in my room. I’ve been drawing.” I was a petulant thing from the first, but, then, I do not consider my parents’ actions any less so. “I don’t want to go.”

“Come now, Erik,” the priest coaxed me again, but drew back a step when I looked up at him. “Just come with me… you’ll enjoy the music….”

“I enjoy it _myself!_ I don’t _want_ anyone else!” I’d begun screeching, then, crying out in the way only young boys and girls can, and stomped my feet uselessly against the deafening rug. “Leave me alone, Monsieur Robert!”

My parents chided me for my refusal to respect Monsieur Robert, I recall, and then tried their even, peaceable attempts to have me fall into the church, with more of those phrases about how much I would enjoy it, and how much everyone there would love me. Such words only brought tears to my eyes and tearing at my own hair, willing myself to hear no more of what they said.

By the time I was hurling them “no” after “no” on their proposal, wailing like a beast and fleeing to my room, they had ceased. I didn’t know what had happened, but my senses told me what to do: To be utterly alone. If I had to be forced into the arms of unknown people, I would not follow that path, lovely as it seemed. 

I would leave, then. I would take my things, tears streaming from the mask, and crawl out my window into the night.

It seemed like a daring escape, running from them so that I could be liberated; it wasn't until I was older that I ever paused to consider: Why did they not try to stop me when I ran away?


	2. Lux Beatissima

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A divine light shines in the wilderness.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A second chapter for you... all? Have had four hits at the time of posting this. XP 
> 
> Despite my stated policy of waiting to post until I got a review or even a "kudos" or something, I decided to post this chapter, because I think it more compelling than the first, which I think owns more than its fair share of lame-itude.
> 
> Hope this is a little better.

I didn't know where I was going when I left; I only knew that I wished to be away from those who were new and frightening to me, teaching me ways I didn't understand even at home. Being away seemed the better option, in my child's mind; then, at least, I could find something for myself, not content to be led by the nose to whatever fate was determined safest. It wasn't right. Why should I not be able to draw, and write, and sing whenever I desired, Church-like or no? I remember, once, being told about my father's work as a mason, how he chose an apprenticeship when he was young. _Chose!_ Why did I not have such liberties, at the same age? 

So, I chose anyway, though it was not the most pleasing option. I had left all of my things behind, but my mask and my clothes, and these things seem much more important to one in youth. I wasn’t even prepared to brave the forest, as I’d never been away from home. At first, it felt quite natural, as a cloak warmly concealing a traveler. It was something to explore and be known entirely for myself, in the first half-hour or so, but such calm was not to stay. The oppression of being truly alone for the first time set in before the hour was out, and, suddenly, I regretted the choice I’d made. Was it better to be cloistered, imprisoned, or to be free and without companionship? I couldn’t have said; I only knew that I wanted familiarity again, and that was a dark room with voices just over the threshold, and the sign of benign—if not quite benevolent—life. Then, in the forest, I could not even think to describe the strange sounds of horrors lurking nearby. (I had been touched by many legends of the forest by my father; I suppose I may have run earlier, had I not.)

At any rate, there, my pulse fluttered and my eyes darted into every spot of blackness; my own footsteps rang loud, crashing like thunder into the brittle leaves of late autumn. I had nothing, and, more than that, I had likely distressed my God when I refused to come into His house. I tried to walk, to move forward, in the direction of something, but was fast struck down by a suffocating feeling of dread. I feared to lose that diamond in my soul that I still held with me on fleeing; I kneeled in the wood, knit my bones of fingers, and began to sing in-between gasping breaths,

 _“Veni, Sancte Spiritus… et emitte… Caelitus, Lucis tue Radium….”_ The sweet, uncorrupted words wept out of me; they were my salvation. I was, then, a child, if I hadn’t been before; something base and untouched. It was a curious time.

 _“O Lux Beatissima, Reple Cordis Intima… Tuorum Fidelium… Sine Tuo Numine, Nihil Est in Homine… Nihil est in Noxium…”_ I believed it all, then. I did have the soul to believe it, the clear prism which cast a rainbow of beautiful faith: I _did_ > believe that God would fill the hearts of those who believed; I _did_ believe that, without God, everything harmed, and that I needed His help to see my journey though. Ultimately, I was convinced of that dear light, that divinity that would lead me to what I was meant for, so long as I had my faith.

And I was brought to a light.

It had been some long time walking, weeping, and praying, but I had come to my salvation. In those frost-slowed hours of night, I only had my prayers and the thought of the Lenten story of Jesus to bring my pained, pulsing feet forward through the darkness. (If God didn’t care for me to be His any longer, why should I have been charged so like His son, to suffer trials in the forest?)

That light was a gentle glow that penetrated the forest for many yards before it; it suffused the area, at once casting imposing shadows and leading me to a point of comprehension. The tales of those rogues and blackguards who inhabited the woods should have distressed me more, I suppose, but, in those moments, anything that made itself look like the hearth of home was dear to me.

 _“O Lux Beatissima…”_ The mantra flew past my lips and in my head; I prayed with the fervency of the child I was: One who believed that words could make that light into something welcoming and safe; the light of God. Only saying those words would make it true, for I was guided by the Right path.

I slipped on a patch of dying foliage when I reached the clearing and its light, and a gasp was pulled from me along with the last of my breath. When I could see again, I was the subject of hard stares for neither the first nor the last time. Demands were made: They hissed questions about my identity in strange, staccato accents, puncturing the languor of French; I barely understood them. My legs, burning as they were, contracted to run from the light again in a moment, for I had been led clearly astray, to find the relative calm of the dark again. I observed nothing about the men, as they all seemed to me one leaden force, cold and solid, and which held me fast when I tried to flee; unmasked me before the unforgiving light of their fire.

The surge of brightness and the shock of removal of my mask—for it was a great shock to me; one becomes used to everything, with time, even covering one’s face—had me fainting. So I assume, anyway, for there is a striking break in my memory from that night to some indeterminate period later in which I discovered four walls around me again.

One supposes it should have been a comfort; after all, my greatest distress in the forest had been a lack of walls, nothing to show me that I was in a place meant to enclose and protect. The only difficulty was that these walls were not composed of the smooth masonry of my father, but of thick, blackened bars, stark in the anemic light of the moon; clamoring so near one another that even I, a mere husk, could not force my shoulders through them.

I was screaming. That is all that comes to me, when I try to remember. I couldn’t yet say why, all this time later. I had been confined before that time. But, then, that had been the confinement of a home; I had had my comforting voices and the pleasing noises, the music of life. Here, I was being confined for wrongdoing, or so the bars suggested.

Now, I do not know if you are a Christian. (I am inclined to believe that those religions which suggest a love and tolerance and then insist upon their own “perfection” will die when men begin to think.) If you are, you may recognize the parables which come readily into my mind, even today.

Consider the dark figure, the omnipotent force of evil, the Angel of Music and of Death, but a small, frail child, weeping into the bars of a cage; screaming for something better, for what he was promised by God when he prayed, and the goodness he had before fleeing in sin.

Through that bitter night, I wished that I could be like one of the men in the parables so that I wept harder at the very idea: I wished to be the younger son in Jesus’ story, the one who took all he had, and fled. After squandering all he was worth, he returned to his family, glad to be a slave, so long as he was safe and provided for once more, accepting of what he did wrong. He was reborn in his parents’ love, and exalted, higher even than the purely faithful boy because he intimately knew his sin. I cried direly for that thought. I was the iniquitous boy who rejected Him, and, if I could only return, I could only be greeted with exceeding love.

The thought possessed my consciousness as I attempted to free myself, at that point when I descended from an hysterical, tearful boy without the security of his mask to a ruthlessly determined force, clawing at the bars, and, on finding it, the heavy lock. I ripped out my fingernails and my hair, fractured a tooth, and bled a red perimeter around where I stood, but only succeeded in wearying my body. 

Soon enough, I couldn’t breathe, drowned by the tears and the thick moisture in the medial cavern of my face. I had handicapped my own efforts, and the darkness of the night closed my eyes for me. I fell into a hot, unnatural sleep, driven there by nothing more than physical exhaustion.

When I woke again, I was conscious of a dull pain everywhere, and stirred reluctantly from my fetal position in the center of the cage. Then the eyes appeared at the bars, several dark, one light, all tracking my movements, first weighed down by lethargy, then sharpened by distress.

“It’s up,” one of them whispered, small eyes wide in a large, square face, tan and spotted with the sun, the same sun that plagued me so far in those moments as to illuminate every crevice of my horror. I attempted to induce the one line of cool shadow in the back of the cage to hide me; when it failed, I buried my head in my knees and cried out into them. Some moments of this had me wondering, in some wild dream, if the charade had induced them to leave me. Then I was being prodded by something sharp and metallic, and forced back into the light of the middle of the enclosure.

“We can’t have that… people are coming to see you soon,” another one of the men spoke, smiling a dark-toothed smile and limping back to his spot with the others on a gilded cane. The words were so… curious, indescribably, with a trace of something foreign and unknown that, then, sent an unreasonable shudder through me. Still, the word “people” caught my attention, and I felt my head shaking “no” even before the thought occurred to my mind.

“I-I don’t like people.” I couldn’t even manage a whisper; my speech was a hoarse squeak, piercing and dry from the night’s panic. It brought forth laughter and smiles from two of the men, and, if I recall rightly, furrowed brows from the other pair.

“Hard luck, that. People like oddities. Don’t worry; you’ll be kept as well as you need.” My head continued shaking, against even that suggestion of some kind of hospitality. That stubborn quality of childhood kept me persisting, returning to the idea that, though strange, these people, too, would listen to my desire to leave, if only I could make myself understood.

“Surely… surely, I can… get out… leave… my family will… miss me…” Hardly the truth; the laughter that followed made the untruth sting even more.

“You’ll get out when you can be trusted, my dear,” a taller man who was nearly as bony as me said in a perversely fond tone, and reached through the bars to touch my head; I scrambled back through the hay—stained here and thee with blood from my prior madness—and stared brightly up at them. The sudden silence was filled with the sickly beating of my heart in my ears.

The smiles stopped; I was spat at, and, finally, left. I prayed again, for my good fortune to continue.

It would soon be time to meet my public.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> People have come to view Erik for the first time; being unused to people, among other things, it isn't the best of experiences.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: I own nothin', as usual.
> 
> Hope that you like this chapter... well, if someone reads it. I feel, given my traffic thus far, that's kind of unlikely, but... whatever. As I started this work years ago, I fear that my writing isn't as good in it as it could be. I've always wanted to continue it, but... well, I'd need someone to actually like this work, and I rather think that it's too far-gone for that. Ah, well.
> 
> Kindly review? Or something, if you have time? I'd greatly appreciate any feedback you have to give me. =3

When I was alone, finally truly awake, with all of my fears settling into me, a million questions were raised, one for every movement of my eyes across the landscape of my surroundings. It was the first I had the clarity to observe since I had been taken. That clarity was hardly a virtue; my stomach turned immediately with the foreign taste of blood and the grit of a pulverized canine all around my sticky mouth. I retched, but hadn't the strength to vomit.

As the nausea passed, I observed that the clearing seemed larger, and the trees denser than the night prior; had we moved? For how long had we travelled? Where had I been taken? Was I still in my native land, or had I been spirited to whatever place gave these people their queer French? Why was I to be seen; why did people want to see me? It made no sense to the child's mind that understood only one way of life. No-one wanted to see me before.

Quite the contrary—I was hidden, in my life until that point. I had been long convinced, this being so, that I must have been to an entirely new world, full of strange and malign laws. My world of home—my world of three others—always had its sweet, lyrical French, pale complexions, and the assertion that I was to be masked at all times. This new place… it was contrary on all those points, and, to a dreadfully contained microcosm of a child, such differences all felt frighteningly perverse. In my home, even I followed some of the rules of that place I had come from.

Did these new people have a God? What a terrible wonder it would be, to have been put among the Godless! Would God have put me there to outcast me, to share in the sufferings of Jesus to be closer to Him, or did He bring me forth to teach those who did not know Him? Why, that put me back in the same place I was with my family, but with an even more frightening strain of people. Was I simply being rejected, for my disobedience to Him?

My thoughts were drawn away from my Lord, by degrees, as the sensory provocation of my environment pulled me back to it. Yes, we were still in the clearing; the sunlight shone a radiant gold, burningly bright, filtered through the dead leaves yet hanging from nearly-barren trees. There was a small crowd of people milling around some distance away from me, around a fire; they were all dressed in colours, and looked beyond a forlorn-looking little fence to a broad line of people. There was a steady chatter from that crowd, light, bright, and punctuated with shouts by the many children—children around my age, outside, laughing and free. Those particularly galvanized me; had me crying out and drawing the eyes of people, the crowd and those four men I'd been acquainted with. The collective voice of the crowd rose with mine, and one of the four men—the one with his silver-tipped cane—came and drew a cloth over the front of the cage, murmuring some stray insult to whoever forgot to cover the 'new display'. The sun was shaded, I was closed off, and my vision was further clouded by a veneer of tears.

The constant chatter outside began to diffuse as I sat, alone; the group was taking pasture within the gates. In short enough time, however, the sounds began to concentrate near to the blanket before me. My heart felt like it had been filled with gravel, unsettled and sinking, heavy, in my chest. Then, a man with a great deal of baritone bravado in his voice called to settle the crowd.

"Now, now! Don't you all want to know the _sordid_ tale first?" The man—whichever of the four he was—sounded a perfect story-teller, even with his convulsive French. He was met almost immediately with an overwhelming cry of assent. "Ladies and Gentleman… what you shall see before you is a horror yet unknown to the Earth. Many years ago, this loathsome form crawled out of the womb of its mother. Both were already buried, deep within the black earth. She was said to have conceived with Death himself, but her human vessel was too weak to bear the child of the great Fate. The child survived beyond the grave, for he is as inexorable as his father. This monstrous figure now roams the land, warning man of his inevitable end. Now, I present to you: _Le Cadavre Vivant!"_

What a strange drama he did tell! Rather than indignant, wondering why he spoke so about me, the curious tale distracted me from my own misery for some moments, and had me listening to him as intently as the crowd must have been.

Next I knew, the blanket was being torn away, and I was again forced into the damning world of light.

I heard the gasping and the awe of the people before I saw them. When I opened my eyes which loved the dark so well, I was struck by a repulsive image of humanity. The crowd was mixed, in terms of appearance: Some dressed well—or, rather, as I recall my parents dressing—some in near-rags; many were young boys, though several men and a couple of girls and young women gaped along with the others. What distressed me—what drew me, cowering, back from the front of the cage—was the ravenous look all of them seemed to give me, devouring my hideousness even as it made some of them cry out.

My timidity didn't earn me any favours with them; jeering began the moment I fell into a stray shadow. A large sort of man took to hitting the bars and glaring into the darkness I was shaded in, a murderous, searching sort of stare.

The cane brought me staggering forward again on my hands and knees, staring up into faces—for it seemed my only choice—and shaking. They were emboldened. They, the people meant to be frightened by the graven image of death. They smirked, smiled; laughed.

All at once, I saw fit to appeal to their mercy.

In my life of three, Reverend Robert always listened, and cared. If one in my miniscule family had been so kind, why should not at least one of the multitude before me have been the same?

"Please," I began, thickly. I could hardly work my tongue around the delicacy of my language, laden as I was with fear and an achingly dry mouth. "Please… I don't belong here. I'm lost. I want to go home."

This set the crowd to a rumble of laughter once more. I didn't understand, then. Had these people, French people—for I had heard them speak!—no sympathy for a lost child? Were they not supposed to be my brothers, in liberty, fraternity, and equality? (That spark of pride in French goodness was strong in me, from my mother's saccharine history lessons.)

I was no model of Jesus then, no great, noble figure who accepts his fate and calmly commends his spirit to the power of the Lord. No, I was torn by Earthly suffering, only wanting my placid life and all its familiarity back, that mild climate of home. When I could open my tearful eyes, I saw the faces of my mother, my father, and Reverend Robert, dotted through the crowd.

The thoughts were frenzied, barbed; I wept again with the force of them, and made a cry to them. I screamed, and my lungs burned in my chest.

"Bring me home! I don't want to be seen… make them stop looking at me!"

They didn't listen. They only laughed, at first; when my fury ceased to amuse, they—all of them, for those three seemed to me to comprise the entire crowd for an instant—called out for having been 'sold' and demanded to be shown to something better. The man with the cane, sensing an immanent loss of profit, agreed with a gay half-laugh, and drew a broad gesture with over to a nearby stage. There was a willowy sort of man there, smiling at the audience as they approached, and proceeding to stretch the skin of his cheeks to improbable lengths.

Since attention was off of me, I fell to the floor. I had been drawn into a moment of despair by the dispassion of men even before I could hope to realize it, in my ignorance. When I looked back, the crowd was a conglomerate of normal folks once more, watching their new entertainer with that familiar repulsed fascination.

I had to give up watching them quickly; I could not hope even to hold my head up to look at them, let alone to beg for mercy once more. Expostulation drains one faster than draining blood, when the pleas are unfulfilled. The fact has been a constant through all of my days.

I fell into something of a black state. Not to say that any real mood possessed me—simply that there was nothing. It was a formless place, a pure sort of existence hovering, thoughtless, between fainting and waking. I wonder, even today, why that was. As a child of little knowledge, I should have been thinking, and deciding how to work my way free. But not a thought crossed me, then; it was a strange sort of peace, laying there in the warm sun; hearing the occasional footstep, a pause briefly, before me, and passing on.  
When my consciousness came back to me, sharp and keen as the unexpectedly chilled wind whistling through my cage, it was by the efforts of the showman, tolling a low, clamouring array of Ds on one of the cross-bars. That note remains something of a personal horror for me.

The showman's dark eyes perfectly echoed his sonorous pitch as he looked at me, and I made an instinctive effort to sit up.

"Awake now, are we?" That voice questioned sharply. None of that warm interest, that captivating sense of a tale drew me to listen any longer; as my eyes fell away from him, he drew his cane shudderingly across the front bars, snapping me back to attention. "That was a very bad performance; very bad. You shall hardly begin to earn your keep, behaving that way."

I shrank back, once more; I could feel, radiating from the front wall of my cage, an angry force focused directly on me. That sense didn't register as a thought, however. I had no idea of what was coming, gazing into the unnaturally blanched face of my captor, whose cane shook slightly in a tight-fisted hand. He appeared immense, hovering over me; his dark eyes seemed to block out all the sunlight filtering through the coming clouds. With a snap of the wrist, his cane slapped onto his opposite hand, and he held it parallel to the floor; I jumped, and a tight smile twitched onto his unshaven face.

"If you're scared so easily, why didn't you _behave?"_ His final words hissed out at me, and themselves whistled into the scream of the air being lashed by a silver-tipped cane, just as I was an instant later. I didn't scream like that. I hadn't the voice to vocalize; I thought, before drifting off, that my voice had gone from me with my begging to be freed, and that it was lost to me forever.

But, though I needed my voice—my sole virtue—and was pained to think it had left me, it was nothing like the taste of the lash. My parents had stood at a distance in everything; that was why, with regard to the light sort of mischief, I'd never been punished so. (And, since I confessed during the week, I didn't even have to fear reprisal from God.)

This man… he bewildered by his strength. He seemed to me to find every point of me that had suffered so badly with my sojourn in the forest: my back, my neck; even places he couldn't reach in the instinctively tight pose I'd wrapped myself into flared anew in sympathy with the rest of my blazing frame. Everything in me begged to move, tensed for flight, but the strength even to keep my head protected by my hands eventually failed me under the onslaught.

I don't recall the actual pain, much as I remember the condition, the fear of it all, and all that my frenzied mind said to me the moment it was over. It's now an instant in my past, and, much as I try, I have no real memory of that great pain my mind screamed was the touch of Hellfire.


End file.
